A Bad Attitude: A Novel from the Vietnam War

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What Breed of Liberal I Am

My Liberal Identity:

You are a New Left Hipster, also known as a MoveOn.org liberal, Netroots activist, or Daily Show fanatic. You believe that if we really want to defend American values, conservative hatriots must be exposed and mocked for every fanatical, puritanical, soulless, paranoid, fact-free, obstructionist ideal for which they stand.

More Quotations

"I don't see why we need to stand by and watch a country go communist due to the irresponsibility of its people. The issues are much too important for the Chilean voters to be left to decide for themselves."

-- Henry Kissinger

"When you give food to the poor, they call you a saint. When you ask why the poor have no food, they call you a communist."

-- Archbishop Helder Camara

"It is a truism that almost any sect, cult, or religion will legislate its creeds into law if it acquires the political power to do so, and will follow it by suppressing opposition, subverting all education to seize early the minds of the young, and by killing, locking up, or driving underground all heretics."

-- Robert A. Heinlein

"Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities."

-- Voltaire

"If you don't stand for something you will fall for anything."

-- Malcolm X

"The less justified a man is in claiming excellence for his own self, the more ready he is to claim all excellence for his nation, his religion, his race or his holy cause."

-- Eric Hoffer

"When fascism comes to America, it will be wrapped in the flag, carrying a cross."

-- Sinclair Lewis

"Secular schools can never be tolerated because such a school has no religious instruction and a general moral instruction without a religious foundation is built on air; consequently, all character training and religion must be derived from faith.... We need believing people."

-- Adolph Hitler

"I believe in an America where the separation of church and state is absolute--where no Catholic prelate would tell the President (should he be Catholic) how to act, and no Protestant minister would tell his parishioners for whom to vote -- where no church or church school is granted any public funds or political preference -- and where no man is denied public office merely because his religion differs from the President who might appoint him or the people who might elect him."

-- President John F. Kennedy

"To assert that the earth revolves around the sun is as erroneous as to claim that Jesus was not born of a virgin."

-- Cardinal Roberto Bellarmine, 1615,during the trial of Galileo

"Christian Fundamentalism: The doctrine that there is an absolutely-powerful infinitely-knowledgeable universe-spanning entity that is deeply and personally concerned about my sex life."

-- Andrew Lias

"When a man is freed of religion, he has a better chance to live a normal and wholesome life."

-- Sigmund Freud

"All wonder is the effect of novelty upon ignorance."

-- Samuel Johnson

"Those who give up liberty for security deserve neither and will lose both."

-- Benjamin Franklin

"It is in no way lawful to demand, to defend, or to grant unconditional freedom of thought, or speech, of writing, or of religion, as if they were so many rights that nature has given to man."

-- Pope Gregory XVI (1831-1846)

"There is no need to sally forth, for it remains true that those things which make us human are, curiously enough, always close at hand. Resolve, then, that on this very ground, with small flags waving and tinny blasts of tiny trumpets, we shall meet the enemy, and not only may he be ours, he may be us."

Tuesday, April 07, 2009

Maybe we should legalize drugs.I come neither eagerly nor easily to that maybe. Rather, I come by way of spiraling drug violence in Mexico that recently forced Secretary of State Hillary Clinton to acknowledge the role America's insatiable appetite for narcotics plays in the carnage. I come by way of watching Olympian Michael Phelps do the usual public-relations song and dance after being outed smoking weed, and knowing the whole thing was a ritualized farce.. . .The War on Drugs came into being under President Nixon, whose chief of staff, H.R. Haldeman, once quoted the president as saying, "You have to face the fact that the whole problem is really the blacks. The key is to devise a system that recognizes this all while not appearing to." Small wonder blacks account for 13 percent of the nation's regular drug users, but more than 70 percent of all those jailed for drug use.. . .In 1914, when the first federal drug law was enacted, the government estimated 1.3 percent of us were addicted to illegal drugs. In 1970, when the War on Drugs began, the government estimated 1.3 percent of us were addicted to illegal drugs. Thirty-nine million arrests later ... the government says 1.3 percent of us are addicted to illegal drugs. [Emphasis added]

There are a couple of very telling statistics in there:

(1) Over 70% of individuals jailed for drug use are black. And that's in large part due to the fact that the draconian penalties for crack cocaine (primarily used by blacks) have been in stark opposition to the slap-on-the-wrist penalties for rock cocaine (primarily used by upper middle class lawyers, congressmen, etc., of the white race).

(2) In nearly 30 years of arresting and locking away drug users, the addiction rate is the same as it was in 1970, when all this crap started -- and the same as it was in 1914, when drugs were first made illegal. What's that old line about insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result? Well, this is it.

So yes, I agree with Pitts. When it comes to so-called "illegal drugs", legalize them, control them and tax them. It would have a positive dual effect on the economy: Increased revenue from the taxation, and decreased outlay for all of those prisons needed to lock up non-violent drug offenders.